Sentences of the Day

n Benin, Africa, some very interesting research was done into what would make people buy a latrine. Mothers, who didn’t have a latrine, could see that their kids were getting sick every week with diarrhoea. They were spending money on medicine, and their kids weren’t going to school, but they still wouldn’t buy a latrine.

(Rose George, author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, a book about shit).

David Balan attributes the mother’s attitude to laziness in the face of high stakes, but I think that cultural conformity is the real reason: we are, almost invariably, very wary of doing things that are not commonly done by the people around us. In general, it’s a pretty good heuristic. Here, it’s catastrophic.